I visited this site yesterday (2nd May 2013), the following is a post I made on Facebook about the area - I thought it might be of interest:
I went for a long walk on south Dartmoor today. My mission was to take a look at the Hook Lake (Brown Heath) stone row - which is near the Erme Rings enclosures near Erme Pound.
I got a train to Ivybridge and walked up the east side of the River Erme passing the Butter Brook reservoir and Harford Gate. I ended up on the old Redlake rail track path and forked off across rough terrain towards where the Hook Lake (stream) meets the river Erme. The rail track was connected with the Red Lake china works that opened in 1910 and closed in 1933. From a distance you can see the outline of the Erme Rings in the landscape - the series of large enclosures near Hook Lake.
It is a curious place - a rich palimpsest as the archaeologists would say [translating into English: a rich mix of features from different historic periods]. The first thing that struck me was the area around the Hook Lake stream marked as Stony Bottom on the map - it has the unmistakeable appearance of a landscape created by tin streaming works (probably medieval or a bit later) as are the clearly man-made ridges north of the stream. Beyond these is the massive wall of the southern most of the Erme Rings.
From the eastern side of this first enclosure is the Hook Lake stone row. In itself quite a small and unremarkable stone row. I have taken some photos but I have not uploaded them as the stones are knee-height at most with most considerably smaller. The interesting thing about this row is that it merges into the wall of this enclosure. Then if you follow it along its length it physically touches a hut circle, with one of the stones of the row being incorporated into the hut circle. A short distance further is a cairn with a cist which is surrounded by a ring of stones, the cairn is more impressive than the row. This cairn is extremely close to the second of the Erme Ring enclosures - within 1 metre of the circuit wall which "only grudgingly avoids the terminal cairn" (Jeremy Butler in "Dartmoor Atlas of Antiquities Vol. 4").
Richard Nichols Worth (father of Richard Hansford Worth, the author of "Worth's dartmoor") commented on this in the first of his series "The Stone Rows of Dartmoor" in the "Transactions of the Devonshire Association" as far back as 1892 - he concluded "the wall of the pound, which we must assume is of a later date". He would not have known what we now know, namely, that the stone rows date from the late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age where as the settlements, pounds and hut circles are from much later in the Bronze Age. R.N. Worth's observation was quite remarkable for the time. So those constructing these enclosures and huts would have done so up to potentially a thousand years or more later - clearly they had a certain disregard for the older monuments from a presumably forgotten age yet they did leave them in tact, the stones may have been incorporated into other structures but the stones of the row were not robbed out. Across the river from here the stone circle known as "The Dancers" (strictly speaking a carin circle) and the associated Erme stone row can be seen pricking the landscape as it disappears off into the distance (it is over 3Km long).
Further North from the second enclosure is the huge and quite fascinating structure known as Erme Pound. Again we have the meeting of different ages. This time there are tinners' huts (medieval or much later) incorporated within the prehistoric pound. Some of the internal walls look prehistoric except they are surprisingly rectangular which would suggest they were added by the tinners, others are the more typically rounded or curved walls of the prehistoric. Erme Pound itself is well known as being used as a "drift pound" much like Dunnabridge Pound. The drifts were organised efforts to impound stray cattle and livestock illegally grazing on the moor. The first record of the use of Dunnabrdge as a drift pound dates back to 1342.
Finally it was nice to hear cuckoos and I think I saw a merlin - I'm not positive about the identification but it was small and had a distinctive orange colour underneath.
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